Re: [gnome-flashback] Debug-ability; getting gnome-panel 3.8 out

[Lanoxx <lanoxx gmx net>]

Hello Philipp,

thank you very much for working on this and taking the time to write
this comprehensive summary. As I am still using gnome-panel this is
really appreciated.

I have tried a couple of times to build gnome-flashback with jhbuild but
each time I gave up after a few hours. There were always a multitude of
little problems starting from knowing which moduleset to use to missing
library and dependencies. The biggest problems were that when I try to
build the gnome-3-8 moduelset jhbuild is trying to pull in a whole lot
of dependencies which are not actually necessary for gnome-fallback and
which are also installed in the correct version on my system.

It would be really be great if there was a small guide on howto build
and install gnome-flashback. If possible with a minimum of additional
libraries. You may correct me if I am wrong, but from what I saw of the
commits in git, it does not seem there have been a lot of changes which
make newer versions of libraries necessary. In theory shouldnt it be
possible to reuse most of the libraries installed on a Ubuntu 12.10.

Kind Regards
Sebastian

On 23/09/13 19:33, Philipp Kaluza wrote:
> Dear Co-Maintainers and other Gnome Flashback stakeholders,
>
> let me start with some good news:
> I'm writing this from within a running gnome-flashback session.
>
> It took me quite a while, but I've *finally* made enough progress
> building gnome-panel master against a current sid (Debian unstable)
> environment to feel that this is going somewhere.
>
> Let me be clear: the debug-ability of Gnome Flashback currently stinks.
> The sessions might not appear in gdm, appear but don't get started, or
> get started and then show the fail screen. The reason is that gdm is a
> system-wide component, and we need to integrate that. And on the other
> side gnome-session is a bit of a moving target (it or the components it
> tries to launch lost some functionality in the 3.8 timeframe, and
> presumably more in 3.10) - and we need to integrate with that as well.
>
> Jhbuilding does not give the required system integration (even when
> fiddling with lots of symlinks and session files), building on a Debian
> system brought its own set of challanges (version-wise; there was a
> freeze...), and testing on an Ubuntu system was no easier. (Fedora might
> have helped, but what little time I had there I spent fighting^Wgetting
> to know systemd.)
>
> But it's important that interested people can get something basic
> running again, or soonish we can declare the whole flashback part of the
> stack bitcompost.
>
> So, what can we do about this ?
>
> 1) Better logging when searching for errors:
> To this extend, I just pushed commit 39b6b48, which adds a wrapper
> script named (surprise) gnome-session-flashback. We need a wrapper
> script anyhow; if a ~/.xsession-errors-flashback exists, we tee
> gnome-sessions STDERR to it. (The normal .xsession-errors did for some
> reason not log reliably for me.)
>
> 2) Get something into distributions - which means, release a tarball.
>
> There _are_ regressions (nautilus is deactivated currently due to
> #695088, most probably others…), but at this point it's more important
> to release *something*, so we can get feedback from distributions and
> others.
>
> From an upstream POV, I just want to get a 3.8.0 tarball out (and branch
> for 3.8), before the final 3.10 stuff starts to hit gnome ftp.
>
> From a Debian (and I guess Ubuntu) POV, we need to have a story on how
> to deal with approaching influx of 3.8 packages.
>
> 2b) It's also conceivable to work on compatibility with 3.10 ASAP, and
> jump directly to releasing a gnome-panel 3.10 shortly after gnome 3.10
> next month. As I have not even started build-testing gnome-panel in a
> 3.10 environment yet, I would only consider this path if I felt there
> was some strong support from somebody else here for such a path.
>
> @Jonathan, @Josselin: I would like to hear your experiences and
> especially your needs wrt. releasing the Debian and Ubuntu packages.
> (AFAICT there is no PPA yet with gnome-panel 3.7, right ?) Jeremy pushed
> some of his Ubuntu patches last, but indicated to me that he no longer
> has time to work on this.
>
> @Everybody: any bugs (preferably with patches) you consider blockers for
> a mini-release as described above ?
>
> Thank you for your timely feedback. :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Philipp